Chapter 603 - 374: Trial

The bruised, stagnant sky above the endless boneyard seemed to lower itself further, pressing against the shattered earth like a swollen, purplish bruise.

The colossal, hundred-meter blade of ancient celestial iron had receded into the haze behind them, its silver-etched Clear Universe Imperial Writing still pulsing with a faint, steady heartbeat that resonated within the marrow of Qian Yunxi’s bones.

Every footstep she took across the field of slaughter produced a wet, brittle crunch.

Beneath her white leather boots lay centuries of pulverized ribcages, sundered iron shields, and the calcified vertebrae of war beasts that had died before modern dynasties were ever conceived.

Beside her, Qing Yan walked with measured caution, his fingers constantly brushing the cold scabbard at his hip.

His azure robes were stained with dried black mire, and his sharp, vigilant gaze darted between the mountains of skeletal remains flanking their path.

The foul reek of ancient rot and coppery rust hung thick in the air, but the frantic terror that had gripped them upon their initial arrival had slowly cooled into an eerie, calculating sobriety.

At this moment, Qian Yunxi and Qing Yan were walking around the battlefield and talking about their theories about what this place really is.

"...Looking at the density of the spatial laws here," Qing Yan murmured, his voice hushed as if afraid to wake the slumbering dead beneath their heels.

He gestured toward a faint, shimmering seam in the empty air ten paces to their left, where the light refracted like cracked crystal.

"I think the void barrier-like thing that is surrounding this realm was cast down deliberately. It feels like an ancient battlefield sealed off from the outside world, a pocket dimension forcefully severed from the leylines of the greater cosmos, locked in a perpetual state of temporal stagnation to preserve the moment of slaughter."

Qian Yunxi nodded slowly, her brow furrowed in deep thought.

"...The architecture of the ruins buried under these corpses... they don’t belong to common border fortresses or frontier garrisons," she observed, pointing toward a colossal archway of shattered white marble protruding from a mound of bleached skulls.

The arch was carved with intricate reliefs of celestial suns, ascending thrones, and winged seraphim kneeling before a radiant throne.

"Those are the foundational stones of an imperial citadel. This place... it was probably where the capital of the ancient eastern divine empire once stood."

"The capital of an ancient empire," Qing Yan breathed, his pulse quickening beneath his collar, his mind raced through the dusty chronicles he had covertly studied. "The epicenter of the prehistoric unification wars. If this was the seat of dominion, where the emperor and his devout legions made their final, bloody stand against the encroaching dark..."

He trailed off, his boots halting abruptly on a slab of cracked, black slate.

Qian Yunxi stopped as well, her breath catching in her throat as a sudden, breathtaking realization struck her mind like a bolt of golden lightning.

’Or maybe, this might even be an inheritance site...’

As the two thought of that possibility, they froze.

The quiet of the vast tomb became deafening.

If this was an inheritance site, then...

Then this was not a meaningless graveyard of forgotten bones, nor was it a cruel cosmic trap designed to rot their corpses in the mud.

This entire severed dimension was a sacred trial ground!

The hundred meter sword, the spectral giant who had wept golden tears of absolute devotion, the resonant humming within her ancestral bloodline—everything had been slumbering in the dark for hundreds of thousands of years, waiting for the true, unpolluted blood of the primeval monarch to set foot upon this soil!

An inheritance left behind by the supreme existence of the ancient Eastern Region—a figure whose might had once cast a golden shadow across the Four Cardinal Regions and fought a war for the unification the six regions—was a treasure that defied the understanding of the modern world!

If she could claim the core of this trial, it will surely be able to elevate the Spirit Hall and her own standing into an untouchable, god-like realm!

HUUUUUUMMMMM!

Before the thought could fully settle in their racing hearts, reality shattered.

At that moment, a bright light appeared between them, forcing them to close their eyes!

It did not burst forth with the roar of thunder, but with an instantaneous, blinding flare of unblemished solar brilliance!

A vertical rift of radiant, incandescent gold sliced down through the empty space directly separating Qian Yunxi and Qing Yan, peeling the atmosphere apart with a deafening, crystalline hum!

The glare was so searing, so pure and overwhelming that it burned straight through their closed eyelids, painting their vision in sheer white fire!

The spatial currents around them twisted like violent whirlpools, wrenching their footing away from the solid bedrock!

"Yunxi!" Qing Yan’s shout was torn away by the howling gale of dimensional displacement.

The blinding light snapped shut like the jaws of an ancient iron gate and the world returned to its bruised, purple twilight, but the surrounding landscape had shifted completely.

Qian Yunxi stood alone in the center of an immense, circular amphitheater carved from ancient, blood-veined white marble.

The colossal stone pillars encircling the arena were broken, draped in withered vines of thorned briars, and the ground was a flat, cracked expanse of sacrificial slate.

Qing Yan was nowhere to be seen.

There was no trace of him, no sound of his footsteps, and no ripple of his spiritual qi in the surrounding void.

Perhaps the place had recognized the bearer of the royal bloodline and instantly isolated her, stripping away all external crutches to test the candidate in solitary isolation.

Qian Yunxi took a deep breath, her chest rising and falling beneath her white battle tunic, and took out her holy sword.

SHING!

A crisp, cold chime echoed through the silent amphitheater as she drew her holy sword from her storage ring.

The golden blade hummed with a steady, warm luminescence, casting long, sharp shadows across the cracked marble.

Her knuckles tightened around the hilt, her senses sharpening to a razor’s edge as she braced her feet in a wide, balanced stance.

SKRRRRR... SQUELCH.

From the ground beneath her boots, the earth began to groan.

The hair on the back of her neck stood straight up on end as the cracked marble slabs began to buckle and heave!

And then...

CRACK! SPLAT!

Skeletal, decaying arms clad in rusted golden gauntlets punched through the stone flags!

One by one, dozens of nightmarish figures dragged their broken, putrid bodies out of the burial mud!

They possessed the silhouettes of towering, celestial warriors, but whatever holy glory they had held in life had been warped into an unspeakable, sickening parody of sacred majesty.

From their broad, hunched shoulder blades sprouted pairs of feathered wings—structures that should have been magnificent, shining appendages of pure light, identical in form and anatomy to her own.

But these wings were horrific.

The feathers were charred, greasy, and sloughing off in wet, blackened clumps.

The exposed quills were brittle and brown, dripping with a foul, yellowish bile that hissed as it ate into the marble floor.

Beneath the remaining down, thousands of pale, fat maggots wriggled and squirmed through the rotted muscle fibers, chewing through decayed veins and tumbling from the necrotic feathers in writhing, greasy showers!

Their faces were half-eaten skulls, dried gray skin stretched taut over hollow cheekbones.

Their empty eye sockets burned with sickly, greenish-purple ghost fires that wept oily black tears, and their jaws hung loosely from broken hinges, clicking and grinding their yellowed fangs in a frenzy of eternal, insatiable starvation!

"Ugh...!"

A violent wave of bile rushed up her throat, the suffocating stench of decayed meat, rotting feathers, and foul grave maggots slamming into her senses like a physical hammer.

Her stomach heaved violently, her pale face turning paper-white as she instinctively pressed the back of her left hand against her lips.

It was a desecration of the sacred form she held dear—a grotesque, mocking perversion of the pure wings that made every drop of her blood boil with cold, nauseating horror.

But she quickly recollected herself.

She was not a fragile maiden to be cowed by the rotting husks of the past!

She was the Holy Maiden of the Spirit Hall, an imperial scion who had clawed her way through the trials of the academy!

Her blue eyes hardened into twin chips of frozen amber as she swallowed down the bitter taste in her mouth, her core erupting into pure, unyielding resolve.

"Desecrating the wings of the divine... rest in the dirt where you belong!"

BOOOOOOM!

Six colossal wings of blinding, incandescent solar fire exploded from her back with a concussive shockwave that blasted the squirming maggots and loose gravel fifty paces away!

The holy radiance formed a brilliant, rotating halo behind her head, bathing the ruined amphitheater in a sea of pure, golden dawn!

SKREEEEEECH!

The winged corpses shrieked in discordant agony at the sight of the sacred light, their rotten wings beating the air with wet, sickening flaps as they lunged forward!

They moved with terrifying, unnatural speed, their rusted swords, chipped halberds, and jagged bone claws descending upon her in an inescapable storm of necrotic violence!

Qian Yunxi’s figure blurred.

She did not retreat an inch. She kicked off the cracked marble, her boots leaving scorched, smoking prints in the stone, darting directly into the heart of the rotting horde!

"Radiance of the First Dawn!"

Her holy sword swept out in a wide, horizontal arc!

SHING!

A crescent wave of pure, condensed celestial fire tore through the air, vibrating with the high pitched hum of divine sword intent!

The leading abomination, an eight foot tall corpse whose rotten wings were dripping with bile, raised its rusted claymore to block—

CRACK!

The holy blade sheared clean through the rusted iron as if it were rotten wood!

The incandescent arc cleaved through the monster’s collarbone, slicing down through its ribcage and severing its decayed wings from its spine in a blinding explosion of burning heat!

The necrotic flesh was instantly cauterized, the squirming maggots inside its muscle fibers popping and vaporizing into harmless gray ash!

The severed halves of the corpse collapsed onto the stone.

And at that exact second, something miraculous happened.

From the dissolving chest of the slain abomination, a small, walnut sized orb of pure, crystalline golden light drifted upward.

It hummed with an ancient, untainted sacred resonance, the pure, uncorrupted soul-essence of a fallen warrior freed from the defilement of the grave.

Before Qian Yunxi could raise her guard, the orb of light shot forward like an arrow, plunging directly into her sternum!

HUUUUUMMMMM!

A profound, electrifying warmth surged through her primary meridians!

It did not invade or harm her core; it seamlessly melted into her spiritual sea, acting like pure, distilled oil poured onto an open flame!

She realized that an orb of light flew out from the corpse to her, and it increased the quality of her light!

The golden feathers of her six wings flared brighter, their translucent edges shimmering with a denser, more refined solar purity!

The slight impurities lingering in her spiritual qi, accumulated from months of cultivation and rapid breakthroughs, were burned away, her celestial light becoming sharper, heavier, and more authoritative! It was an ancestral baptism!

By slaying these corrupted vessels, she was purifying the trapped spirits of her ancient kin, and in return, their ancient essence was directly refining her bloodline to unprecedented heights!

A fierce, intoxicating thrill rushed through her veins!

"Come!" Qian Yunxi roared, her clear voice ringing like an imperial war horn across the marble arena!

She became an angel of pure, unbridled destruction!

Her six wings snapped forward, propelling her across the arena in blinding, light-speed zigs and zags!

She dove into a cluster of five charging corpses, her holy sword spinning like a wheel of solar fire!

Slash!

Cleave!

Pierce!

She decapitated a winged ghoul with an upward thrust that sent its skull spinning into the air, while her left hand formed a palm strike that detonated a second corpse’s chest into flying bone splinters!

A third abomination lunged from behind, its jagged claws aimed at her neck; she didn’t even turn around, snapping her upper right wing backward like an iron blade, slicing the monster’s arms clean off at the elbows!

POP! POP! POP!

Orb after orb of radiant golden light erupted from the falling corpses, swarming into her body like a river of returning stars!

With every abomination she cut down, her aura soared!

Her holy light transformed from a bright yellow flame into a blinding, pristine white gold luminescence that seared the surrounding stone clean of all grime!

Her movements grew faster, her strikes heavier, and her ancestral bloodline roared with the ancient, glorious thunder of an empress reclaiming her long-lost kingdom amidst the slaughter of the dead!